Any move to improve energy and resource use efficiency is both necessary and welcome, and cleaner production, closed loop producer-consumer production systems and industrial symbiosis have dramatically expanded the range of possibilities in this regard. These developments could have serious transitional implications, however, for those countries that are still overly dependent on the export of particular commodities, as any significant increase in the speed with which cleaner and more efficient production systems are developed and deployed is likely to result in lower market prices for those commodities, and a consequent decline in national income. This could, in turn, undermine the attempts being made by those countries to move themselves onto a more sustainable development pathway. At the same time, however, these new production concepts could provide solutions to a number of regional problems, some of which appear daunting and intractable in isolation, but which may be solvable in combination.....read more